The out-of-control encrypted train, OM's market value collapsed by 10 billion yuan. After the operation was exposed, many parties held their own opinions.

Author: Nancy, PANews

With the help of RWA and violent means of pulling the market, MANTRA once attracted the attention of a large number of investors. However, a thrilling price collapse not only put MANTRA in the challenge of price fluctuations, but the intricate "black history" behind it also surfaced, and the crisis of trust and governance tests followed.

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**OM crashes late at night nearly 90%, project parties, exchanges and

investors have their own opinions**

Behind the collapse of OM's market value of 10 billion yuan is a market storm caused by the interweaving of multiple factors.

In the early morning of April 14, the price of MANTRA token OM suddenly fell sharply. According to CoinGecko data, OM prices plummeted by 89.2% in the past 24 hours.

Regarding the flash crash of OM, MANTRA officially explained that the chaos was not caused by the selling of tokens by the team, MANTRA Chain Association, core consultants or MANTRA investors. The tokens are still locked and bound by the published vesting period. The economics of the token remains unchanged. Please do not click on any scam links or impersonate MANTRA accounts.

At the same time, the official pointed out that this incident occurred during a period of low liquidity, which may be due to negligence on the exchange or market manipulation. The timing and depth of the plunge suggest that the account positions were suddenly closed without sufficient warning or notification, which occurred during a period of low liquidity on Sunday night of Universal Standard Time (UTC) (early morning Asian time), indicating that CEX has some degree of negligence or perhaps intentionally adopted market positioning.

Binance confirmed in its statement that OM's price fluctuations have been severely volatile recently, and preliminary investigations showed that it was triggered by "cross-exchange clearing". Since October last year, a number of risk control measures have been implemented for OM tokens, including reducing leverage levels. Since January this year, Binance has added a pop-up warning of OM tokens on its spot trading page, reminding users that the token has made significant adjustments to its token economics and increased the supply of tokens. Binance said it will continue to pay close attention to the situation and take appropriate actions to protect users and maintain platform integrity.

OKX pointed out in the announcement that since October 2024, OM's token economic model has undergone major changes, and since early March, many on-chain addresses with similar operations have been recharged and withdrawn large amounts on various exchanges. Based on market risks, OKX has adjusted the platform's risk control parameters and reminds users that the market risks have been high in the recent past, and changes in the supply of some tokens may lead to price fluctuations. Added risk warning on the OM token page. Meanwhile, OKX CEO Star said this is a major scandal for the entire crypto industry. All on-chain unlocking and recharge data have been made public, and collateral and liquidation data from all mainstream exchanges may be investigated. OKX will prepare all reports.

While MANTRA attributes the blame to the exchange, on-chain data points to a more complex picture, raising community questions about potential internal sell-offs and market manipulation.

According to Spot On Chain, 19 newly created wallets it previously tracked, suspected of belonging to the same entity, transferred 14.27 million OMs (about $91 million) to OKX at an average price of $6.375 within three days before the OM crash. According to The Data Nerd monitoring, in the past three days, five wallets have deposited 24.4 million OMs (about 143.94 million US dollars) into OKX. Four of the wallets have the same operating mode: withdraw cash from Binance Exchange last month and then deposit it into OKX; the other belongs to Laser Digital. According to Lookonchain monitoring, since April 7, at least 17 wallet addresses have deposited a total of 43.6 million OM tokens (worth about US$227 million at the time), accounting for 4.5% of the circulating supply. Meanwhile, five hours before the OM token plummeted, a wallet that had been silent for a year transferred 2 million OMs to Shane Shin, a founding partner of Shorooq Partners, an investment institution that is suspected to be Shane Shin. The wallet received 2 million OMs for $12.58 million, but now it's worth only $1.57 million.

However, Laser Digital, a strategic investor of the MANTRA Chain project, responded that Laser has no connection with the recent price decline of OM. The social media claim that Laser is related to "investor sell-off" is wrong and misleading. Laser has not deposited any OM tokens to OKX, and the wallets mentioned related to OKX are not Laser's wallets. Laser's core OM investment is still locked, with no interest in putting pressure on the token or undermining the stability of the project. Transparency is important.

Investment firm Shorooq Partners also issued a statement clarifying that the decline was not caused by hackers or team sell-offs, but was triggered by large-scale forced liquidation, which subsequently triggered a panic sell-off during the low liquidity period. Shorooq stressed that its position as a long-term equity investor has not changed and disclosed the relevant wallet address to prove transparency.

The project party, the exchange and the investor each have their own opinions. The deeper fuse of this plunge may be due to MANTRA's recent adjustment to the token economic model. Recently, MANTRA's announcement pointed out that the previous community proposal unified OM as the main network native token and abolished the two-coin strategy, but it also brought technical challenges. For this reason, the team decided to abandon the original ERC-20 OM and establish OM on MANTRA Chain as the standard version. At the same time, MANTRA announced that it would double its OM supply, from 888.8 million to 1.777 billion, and introduced an annual inflation rate of 3% to incentivize pledge. Although the move is intended to support ecological growth, the dramatic increase in circulation and unlimited inflation mechanisms are believed to have weakened investor confidence.

It is worth mentioning that although OM has fallen sharply, large-scale token selling continues. Onchain Lens (@OnchainLens) latest monitoring, MANTRA DAO staking wallet sent 38 million OMs (approximately US$26.96 million) to Binance Cold Wallet.

In the early days, I was caught in scam controversy, and **the high

control and narrative trap behind the surge**

MANTRA was predecessored by MANTRA DAO, founded in 2020 and initially focused on pledge, lending and asset management services. However, MANTRA DAO was considered a scam in the early days with popular tags such as DeFi and Polkadot. According to Wu, Blockchain and Hive Finance previously reported that Mantra DAO's core team and consultants have suspicious backgrounds, identity fraud and even a history of fraud. The background of founder Calvin Ng is very controversial and is closely linked to the online gambling website 21Pink. At the same time, the technology and functions of the project itself had not yet been implemented, but Mantra DAO relied on marketing methods and false partnerships to attract investment.

Not only that, MANTRA has also been involved in a litigation storm due to internal disputes. In early 2022, RioDeFi filed a lawsuit against MANTRA DAO, accusing it of ownership, management rights and asset misappropriation. RioDeFi said it founded and developed MANTRA DAO in 2020, but the core team of MANTRA DAO (including six others including co-founder John Patrick Mullin) stopped financial reporting after 2021, misappropriated assets and controlled projects without authorization. MANTRA DAO argues that as a DAO, it is governed by OM token holders, not owned by RioDeFi. In August 2024, the Hong Kong High Court intervened and ordered key MANTRA DAO figures to disclose financial records in response to allegations of misappropriation of assets and unauthorized control. This case became the world's first judicial review of DAO ownership and governance.

In 2022, MANTRA DAO announced its official name to MANTRA and launched a brand restructuring, indicating that it is trying to transform from a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) to a broader blockchain ecosystem. Since 2024, MANTRA has attracted much attention because of OM's strong pull-up. CoinGecko data shows that in 2024 alone, OM rose by more than 168.8 times. At the same time, DeFiLlama data shows that OM's full dilution valuation (FDV) once reached US$15.39 billion in March this year, and has fallen sharply by US$1.25 billion. However, in sharp contrast to its high valuation, OM's total locked position value (TVL) has been at a long-term low since 2023, maintaining only a few hundred thousand dollars.

The project party's high control of the market and the support of the RWA narrative boom are considered to be an important reason for the rise of OM. On the one hand, according to crypto analyst Mosi recently disclosed that the MANTRA team holds 90% of the "circulation" of OM tokens, and the real market circulation accounts for only 5% of the fully diluted valuation (FDV).

However, the high-level control strategy has also laid a bomb with concentrated bargaining chips and fragile liquidity. According to the HashKey Capital member Rui, MANTRA is a ground-promoting OTC trading. The off-market trading reached at least US$500 million in two years. It uses the "new OTC tokens to connect to the old OTC seller" model to operate in a cycle until the final unlocked chip "OTC remains unmoved".

On the other hand, MANTRA has been making frequent moves on the RWA track, sending a series of positive signals, including the establishment of a US$109 million ecosystem fund, cooperation with the UAE DAMAC Group, planning to tokenize US$1 billion assets, introducing Google as a validator and infrastructure provider to cooperate in RWA accelerator, and tokenizing US$500 million real estate assets in Dubai MAG Group.

The intervention of Middle Eastern capital is a turning point in MANTRA's development. According to ArkStream Capital Founding Partner Ye Su, in 2023, when OM token FDV fell to $20 million and was almost abandoned, a Middle East Capital intervened in the acquisition with the help of the middleman and only retained its position as CEO. The Middle East Capital owns a large number of physical assets such as luxury homes, resorts, etc., and then packages the OM into a physical asset tokenization (RWAfi) project. Ye Su said that under high control of the market, OM set a record high in Binance's highest growth rate in 2024, achieving 200 times growth, and the team is still promoting OTC market business recently.

Public information also shows that executives such as MANTRA Lianchuang and CEO John Patrick Mullin, Lianchuang Jayant Ramanand, CTO Matthew Crooks, etc. have all resigned. Moreover, the financing background shows that MANTRA announced in March 2024 that it had received a US$11 million financing led by Shorooq Partners. Shorooq Partners is an Abu Dhabi-based venture capital and alternative investment management company focusing on technology startups in the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan (MENAP). After announcing the investment of Shorooq Partners, MANTRA has launched an incubator at the Dubai World Trade Centre focusing on RWA tokenization projects in the Middle East and North Africa.

Overall, multiple factors such as the unresolved shadow of early controversy, the highly controlled token economy, the behind-the-scenes trading of capital, and the promotion of RWA narrative popularity have formed multiple footnotes to this collapse tragedy.